Linked List: December 4, 2017

Monday, 4 December 2017

Nick Heer on the Deregulation of ISPs 

Nick Heer wrote a terrific response to Ben Thompson on the FCC’s move to overturn Obama era net neutrality regulations:

Even if you believe that the American broadband market is sufficiently competitive — it isn’t — that ISPs can be trusted to not discriminate against some forms of traffic once given the freedom to — doubtful — and that existing regulatory structures will allow any problems to be fixed on a case-by-case basis, it still seems far more efficient to prevent it in the first place. There’s an opportunity to treat internet service as a fundamental utility; let’s keep it that way, whether that’s through Title II classification or an equivalent replacement.

Where Is Amazon’s Prime Video App for Apple TV? 

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

“Amazon is coming to the TV app and all Apple TVs later this year with Amazon Prime Video,” Cook said at Apple’s WWDC keynote, before rattling off a string of original Amazon shows including Mozart in the Jungle, Man in the High Castle, and Transparent.

Tomorrow will mark six months since that news.

There has to be a good story here, but no one seems to know it.

Josh Centers checked with Amazon PR, and they told him it’s still coming this year:

But it’s December, and Amazon Prime Video for the Apple TV remains vaporware. Is it still due in 2017? Surprisingly, yes. Amazon public relations told me, “Thanks for checking in. Yes, you can expect the launch this year.”

Text Replacements Now Sync Reliably Between Macs and iOS Devices Via CloudKit 

Remember back in September, when Brian Stucki dove deep into an investigation of why text replacements didn’t sync reliably between iOS devices and Macs? I was told the next day by an Apple spokesperson that an update that moves text replacement syncing to CloudKit should be rolling out to iOS 11 and MacOS 10.13 High Sierra users in the “next month or so”.

In an update to his original report, Stucki reports that as of last week, this is now the case. So far so good for me personally. I think this deserves a non-sarcastic finally.

How the Minnesota Viking Uniforms Came to Be 

Paul Lukas, writing for ESPN:

Here’s the backstory: The Vikings’ first general manager was former Los Angeles Rams public relations director Bert Rose, and their first coach was former Rams quarterback Norm Van Brocklin. When it came time to create the new team’s look in 1961, they turned to a prominent Los Angeles sports cartoonist named Karl Hubenthal, whom they knew from their days in L.A.

It was Hubenthal — not a Vikings employee, not a Minnesota design firm, not the NFL Properties office — who designed the Norseman logo and the team’s original uniform set, including the distinctive horned helmet. Per Rose’s instruction, Hubenthal executed the designs in purple and gold. Why those colors? Because those are the colors of the University of Washington, where Rose had attended college. So with the L.A. and Washington connections, the look of this quintessentially midwestern team had strong West Coast roots.

The Vikings have stayed true to Hubenthal’s original design to this day. Classic.

‘My Butler Has Two Butlers’ 

Bob Vulfov, writing for McSweeney’s: “Hello, I Am the Mythical Middle-Class Person Who Republicans Say Will Benefit From Their New Tax Bill”.

On Apple Embracing YouTube 

Charlotte Henry:

In terms of getting content in front of as many eyeballs as possible, Apple’s decision then makes perfect sense. However, it is significant in terms of Silicon Valley power politics.

Combine this with Apple’s official channel, which is now home to Apple Music Carpool Karaoke content, and you can see a pattern. Apple has accepted that it has, for the moment at least, completely lost the video platform battle. If it wants to get its video message out, it has to play nicely with Alphabet/Google.

I’d argue that it’s not so much that Apple has lost the video platform battle to YouTube, but that the open web has lost the battle. Apple has never attempted to create a rival service to YouTube. Prior to its embrace of YouTube, what Apple used to do was publish video content on its website, using the HTML5 <video> tag.

There are silos for text content — Facebook, Medium, AMP, Apple News, and more. But none dominate the web. Apple’s own relatively new Newsroom section at apple.com is updated frequently and is just a good old-fashioned blog (although its RSS feed is effectively useless). Still images can still go anywhere on the web. Technically that’s true for video as well, but the discoverability and network effects of YouTube are so strong that practically speaking, it’s the only place anyone puts shareable video content.

Facebook ‘Messenger Kids’ 

Josh Constine, writing for TechCrunch:

For the first time, Facebook is opening up to children under age 13 with a privacy-focused app designed to neutralize child predator threats that plague youth-focused competitors like Snapchat. Rolling out today on iOS in the US, “Messenger Kids” lets parents download the app on their child’s phone or tablet, create a profile for them, and approve friends and family who they can text and video chat with from the main Messenger app.

Tweens don’t sign up for a Facebook account and don’t need a phone number, but can communicate with other Messenger and Messenger Kids users parents sign-off on, so younger siblings don’t get left out of the family group chat. “We’ve been working closely with the FTC so we’re lockstep with them. ‘This works’, they said” Facebook product management director Loren Cheng tells me. “In other apps, they can contact anyone they want or be contacted by anyone” Facebook’s head of Messenger David Marcus notes.

This is like Philip Morris introducing officially licensed candy cigarettes. You’re nuts if you sign your kids up for this.

Safari Technology Preview Now Allows Animated-GIF-Like Videos Using ‘img’ Tag 

Colin Bendell on a new feature in Safari Technology Preview:

  • Now you can <img src=".mp4"> in Safari Technology Preview
  • Early results show mp4s in <img> tags display 20x faster and decode 7x faster than the GIF equivalent — in addition to being 1/14th the file size!
  • Background CSS video & Responsive Video can now be a “thing”.
  • Finally cinemagraphs without the downsides of GIFs!
  • Now we wait for the other browsers to catch-up: This post is 46 MB on Chrome but 2 MB in Safari TP

It’ll take a few years for this to catch on web-wide, but the benefits are massive. It’s really rather ridiculous how popular the GIF format is in 2017.